Shawnee Mission superintendent will serve as vice chairman

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A former chairman of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce will lead a panel created to examine school efficiency.

Sam Williams will head the newly formed K-12 Student Performance and Efficiency Commission, a panel created by House Bill 2506, the controversial school finance and education policy bill signed into law in April.

The commission’s main charge is to identify ways to spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently. That includes examining variances in per-pupil spending among school districts and how districts can share administrative functions, for example.

Williams said he is going into the role of chairman without a personal belief on whether schools might be overfunded or underfunded.

He said the panel will need to explore not only financial efficiency but also the outcomes schools produce.

“The issue of how do we measure the outputs for what we’re putting into it, I think, somewhere along the line is going to have to be a discussion,” he said. “If we can measure the outcomes, then what we spend to get there becomes contextual with the outcomes being created.”

Members of the panel also added a vice chairman, though the bill didn’t call for one, and appointed Shawnee Mission Unified School District 512 superintendent Jim Hinson.

Dave Trabert, of the Kansas Policy Institute, nominated Hinson, saying it was important for the panel and for public perception to have an educator in a leadership role.

Five other seats don’t have voting power and are held by the state education commissioner, the legislative post auditor, the revisor of statutes, the legislative research director and the budget director.

Hinson said the panel took a step away from politics with its choice of chairman and vice chairman.

“I think what happened today is beneficial because from my perspective we’ve tried to keep politics out of this process, and that has to be paramount for us to be successful,” he said. “The perception of making things political by having elected officials or lobbyists be in leadership, I think we avoided that today.”

The panel began its work Thursday with a review of past efficiency audits of specific school districts that had been conducted by Legislative Post Audit, and of the conclusions of the governor’s 2012 school efficiency task force.

Deena Horst, a member of the Kansas State Board of Education, said fiscal responsibility is important, but she expressed hope that educators serving on the panel would help make clear where the line is between efficiency that is positive and efficiency that risks going too far and “cutting to the core” of what schools do.

She also said test scores that are often cited in discussions of school outcomes may seem to be an easy way to assess the performance of students and schools, but they don’t provide the whole picture.

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1. All grades were lumped into a single class.
2. Teacher payroll was one person.
3. Classes began early and were released before lunch, so that kids could get back to labor.
4. Utility costs were minimal (wood for the single stove).
5. Textbooks were non-existent, as was homework.
6. Transportation costs were born by the family (and footwear).

Then we grew up, and our nation prospered

The USA decided we wanted great schools which produce the most educated population possible:

This doesn't pass the smell test. What does a businessman know public education other than Brownback wants to dismantle most rules, reduce drastically the funding. Hasn't Brownback done enough to damage education in Kansas. This is not the little house on the prairie--only in Brownback's mind.